Chef David Barzelay (center) works with his crew at a Lazy Bear event.

Chef David Barzelay (center) works with his crew at a Lazy Bear event.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Forty guests are seated at two tables in a temporary dining space for one of chef David Barzelay's underground dinners.

Forty guests are seated at two tables in a temporary dining space for one of chef David Barzelay's underground dinners.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Cooks and servers plating a dish.

Cooks and servers plating a dish.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Sea cucumber with abalone, caviar, peas and celery at one of chef David Barzelay's Lazy Bear underground dinners in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 9, 2014.

Sea cucumber with abalone, caviar, peas and celery at one of chef David Barzelay's Lazy Bear underground dinners in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 9, 2014.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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The peach pate de fruit with aged balsamic and Genovese basil is readied for one of the dessert plates.

The peach pate de fruit with aged balsamic and Genovese basil is readied for one of the dessert plates.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Barzelay's soft-shell crab tempura with ramp butter sauce.

Barzelay's soft-shell crab tempura with ramp butter sauce.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Guests are encouraged to get up and watch the kitchen activity at chef David Barzelay's Lazy Bear underground dinners.

Guests are encouraged to get up and watch the kitchen activity at chef David Barzelay's Lazy Bear underground dinners.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Mackerel escabeche with peach, melons, bay oil and parsley leaves.

Mackerel escabeche with peach, melons, bay oil and parsley leaves.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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A course is prepared for one of chef David Barzelay's Lazy Bear underground dinners in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 9, 2014.

A course is prepared for one of chef David Barzelay's Lazy Bear underground dinners in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 9, 2014.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Lazy Bear, S.F.'s hottest underground restaurant, to go legit

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Time: 7:23 p.m. on a Thursday evening, sometime in late May. Location: a gallery on the edge of the Mission.

David Barzelay, chef of Lazy Bear, the highest-rated, least-known restaurant in the Bay Area, is bending over 40 bowls of blueberries, surrounded by cooks, dishwashers, volunteers, servers and his seriously pregnant wife.

Some are twirling translucent sheets of lardo into rosettes to tuck among the berries. Others are propping paper-thin slices of porcini mushrooms against the cured pork fat. Barzelay, a 31-year-old redhead with the profile of a gladiator and the build of a rugby player, is spooning porcini cream and dots of spruce oil into the gaps.

These are the last few moments before one of three weekly 15-course dinners Lazy Bear will serve to 40 customers who have been trying desperately for months to get a seat. It is also one of the final dinners that Barzelay and his full-time staff of eight will throw illegally.

You may never have heard of Lazy Bear. Its self-taught chef is such an outsider to the Bay Area restaurant industry that most of the area's pedigreed cooks haven't, either. But social media and Yelp have given this unconventional dining experience serious cachet.

Now a cadre of investors and tens of thousands of fans are helping Lazy Bear go legit. Barzelay's brick-and-mortar restaurant, projected to open in a few weeks, will resemble no restaurant that most of us have ever visited.

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The opening shout

7:35 p.m. The last two diners have taken their seats, and Mary Montgomery, the general manager, leans into the kitchen to shout, "All in!"

A cook, dressed in a black chef's jacket with a yellow bear stitched on the breast, is dispatched to grab siphons out of the immersion circulator and pipe hot, fluffy whipped eggs into shot glasses.

Barzelay bounds into the dining room, where the terrazzo floor has been set with two long tables. "Hi, everyone!" he yells. "I'm David. I'm the chef of Lazy Bear. I'm going to welcome you to this strange little space."

Forty pairs of eyes, some already gleaming from their BYOB wine, fix on him. Three-fourths of the crowd is under the age of 40. Most are coupled up, though some dine in wolf packs. Despite the $110-a-head price tag, not including tax and tip, shirts are untucked and hoodies are rampant.

At top volume, Barzelay's voice crackles as if piped through a gramophone.

"We call this an underground restaurant," he hollers. "You could call it a pop-up. But it's very different from your typical restaurant experience.

"First thing, you're all welcome back in the kitchen anytime. And we mean this. Tell us stories. Bring us drinks. Make sure when you're back there you're observing with your eyes and not your hands." Laughter.

The welcome speech lasts three minutes. Then Barzelay walks back into the kitchen, and the first call of the night goes out.

"Eggs, 7:39," cries the cook who's been filling shot glasses.

"Seven thirty-nine!" repeats everyone else.

The countdown has begun.

Stumbling into a career

David Barzelay didn't set out to be a chef. Rather, cooking ambushed him, and the two wrestled until he admitted that cooking had won.

Barzelay, who grew up in Tampa, Fla., began getting serious about food during his senior year at Vanderbilt University. Funnily enough, law school at Georgetown gave him the time to study cookbooks.

"Even in class, I was reading food blogs on my laptop," he says. "It's all I wanted to be doing, but at that time, I didn't see it as a career."

"Cooking is a particular thing that clicks with his brain," adds Jeanette, his wife, who met David in their first year of law school and moved west with him in 2008. "There's a lot of creativity to it, but also science. A lot of things that make him click work with food."

The two passed the bar soon after graduating and took jobs in San Francisco. Eight months later, the financial crisis of 2009 steamrolled over their new profession. Major firms and tiny practices were shedding staff, and Barzelay, then a first-year associate who owned a well-worn copy of "The French Laundry Cookbook" and a collection of molecular gastronomy supplies, was let go.

Jobs were impossible to find. A healthy severance package, plus Jeanette's income, gave Barzelay the freedom to wait out the job market. He staged (worked for free) at Nopa for a couple of weeks and put in short stints in other kitchens. He dreamed up complicated dishes to beta-test on Jeanette.

Late one night, Jeanette says she looked over at the dozing David and thought, "God, David's been so lazy about his job search. And then I was like, that's funny, the word 'lazy' is in Barzelay. Then I calculated the full anagram: 'Lazy Bear.' 'That could be a fun restaurant name.' "

Tightly plotted meal

8:05 p.m. Three rounds of snacks have gone out, and the first of six savory courses is being plated. Unlike most kitchens, where dinner service can resemble a six-hour, frenzied sprint, here it progresses like a painstakingly arranged domino chain clack-clack-clacking its way to the last tile.

Most of the staff and the night's kitchen volunteers - including a reporter who'd counted on spending the evening in the corner - hover over jiggly circles of smoked-buttermilk custard. They're spooning fresh peas over them and squeezing dots of deviled-egg puree around the dish, which is crowned with curls of lomo and five - count them, five - pea-sprout tendrils. The dish is verdant and pretty, incorporating nostalgia, science-positive techniques and Ferry Plaza market produce. In short, a quintessential Lazy Bear dish.

Barzelay's four line cooks, who have experience at places such as State Bird Provisions and Uchi in Austin, have been here since 10:30 in the morning. They've already logged in three eight-hour prep days this week, followed by a 14-hour day ending at 2 a.m. Nerves, however, are far from frayed.

A half-dozen diners, wineglasses in hand, gather around to watch. In an a la carte restaurant, even waiters think twice before coming close to the cooks at this point - it's like reaching out to pet the muzzle of your rottweiler while he's rutting about in his feed bowl.

Here, though, guests are greeted as they enter the kitchen. One hands Barzelay a glass of 18-year-old Islay that he has decided to pair with, well, everything. Barzelay easily steps away from the table to ask about what he's sipping.

A cook indicates the peas are ready to go. "Diners set starting left," Montgomery calls, indicating which communal table the waiters and cooks should start delivering plates to.

"Starting left!"

"Peas 8:15."

"Eight-fifteen!"

From no-name to No. 1

In September 2009, four months into his unemployment, Barzelay decided to host an underground dinner modeled after the tasting menus at avant-garde restaurants like Alinea and Moto. Naming the dinner Lazy Bear amused Jeanette. Thankfully, so did his plan to store a couple of goat carcasses in their bathtub, covered in ice, as he broke the meat down into sausage and chops.

Barzelay put up a notice about the dinner on his food blog, and another on the message board of the Bay Area Meat CSA. Eight people - four friends, four strangers - gathered in their living room for a 12-course dinner. David cooked. Jeanette served. They stacked the dirty dishes in the bedroom.

Barzelay enjoyed the experience so much he decided to double down a month later. Over the next few years, the house filled up with dishes and glassware, then a second fridge, which the couple stored for a time in the bedroom. Lazy Bear moved outside the house, to the relief of their downstairs neighbor.

Jeanette continued to be the primary server, despite her day job, and David recruited volunteers to help cook. Soon, the cooks were paid. So were federal and state taxes. Finding a primary venue allowed dinners for eight to swell to dinners for 40, and Jeanette's lazy bear began working 14-hour days.

As dinners continued to sell out, the mailing list grew so large that a series of six nights would book up a few hours after Barzelay e-mailed the announcement. He invented a lottery system involving spreadsheets and algorithms that gave those with repeated attempts a better chance of getting in.

Around the two-year mark, Barzelay got a surprise: Lazy Bear appeared on the front page of Yelp, identified as one of the Bay Area's best restaurants. There it has remained. With an almost five-star rating and effusive comments from people who'd managed to score a reservation, Yelp has driven thousands more diners to Lazy Bear's website.

The mailing list, Barzelay says, currently stands at 20,000. Twenty-five hundred applications come in for each 240-seat series of dinners.

The chef takes the five-star ranking with a grain of salt. "People really love what we do," he says, "but to say that we're on the same level as Saison - it's tough. Do people enjoy their experiences as much? Maybe. But there are definitely great restaurants that we aspire to be like."

In 2011, Derek Dukes, an early guest who became a friend, suggested to the Barzelays that they turn Lazy Bear into a proper brick-and-mortar restaurant. They envisioned it as very different from its current incarnation - a large, buzzy bistro reminiscent of Nopa. Dukes, an early Yahoo employee who had invested in Bacar, helped Barzelay come up with a business plan and secure the first round of investors.

Then they began looking for a space. It took 2 1/2 years to find one.

Going legit

A week after the dinner, Barzelay is doing paperwork in the empty shell of Hi Lo BBQ. Two months from now, in August, the Mission space will become Lazy Bear: The Restaurant, or so its owner projects. Jeanette's due date is only three weeks away. (A healthy boy is born ahead of schedule.)

As millions of aspiring Michael Minas have discovered, being a good cook is only a tiny part of owning a profitable restaurant. Even high-end chefs considered "self-taught," such as Charlie Trotter and Daniel Patterson, had years of formal cooking experience before opening their first restaurants. In comparison, Barzelay has spent less than a few months in restaurant kitchens learning their complex polyrhythms and trickier economics.

After five years of 120-hour weeks, however, Barzelay bristles at any intimation that he's an amateur.

"Perhaps we retain some amateurish aspects in a way that is becoming, like, some sense of boyish wonder about food, or a curiosity and an energy," he says, his even temper slipping away enough to let the churning brain show through. "But we don't want to sound like we don't know what we're doing." It gnaws at him that he's never received a critical review.

By the time Barzelay and his business partners signed the lease on the Mission space, they realized: If people love Lazy Bear just the way it is, why not give them the Lazy Bear that its chef has spent five years refining?

In the new space, the chef demonstrates how they're about to install two long communal tables, each seating 20, and arrange the kitchen so diners have a close view of the cooks at work. Instead of preparing one 15-course, intricately plated dinner, Lazy Bear will serve two back-to-back multicourse dinners a night. Guests won't be able to walk into the kitchen anymore, but the elaborate call-and-response system his staff uses to communicate will stay.

Barzelay says raising money for the restaurant has been remarkably easy. Most of his investors are young, with tech-industry savings accounts. They're not throwing in a ton of money - they just want to be part of this project they love.

In the six weeks that the chef has given himself to renovate the space and learn how to raise an infant, he has numerous waiters and prep cooks to hire. Rent is far from cheap. But he says that he spends so much money on event venues, and copes with such an irregular schedule, that it will be more cost-effective to cook for 400 people a week than it has been for 120.

Economically, he says, "this concept totally works as long as it's full."

There's the rub. To keep the seats full - and replace the lottery system that keeps critics and industry people out but makes Lazy Bear dinners such a hot commodity - Barzelay and his partners have persuaded Chicago's Alinea to allow Lazy Bear to license its ticketing software.

Instead of coping with canceled reservations, Lazy Bear will sell tickets - diners will book and pay for a specific date and time. If they can't make it, they'll have to sell their tickets.

"We don't want it to be difficult to get in," Barzelay says. "We're naturally hospitable. Of course, maybe it will be easier to get in to the new place. So that just puts a higher burden on us to make really awesome experiences so people will want to come back."

He pauses a few beats. "But I hope it isn't easier to get in. I very much hope it's really hard to get in."